Category: flash fiction

Smoke Break | Cat Casey

Having never been told no, table 404 asks for extra bread, pleading with the raise of their brows, with their fingers moving to the cash, singles in their back pockets, that I do not ring in, not charge them and instead, trudge down to the kitchen to ask the kitchen boys, who love me, to grill me up some extra bread – already chanting I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry, before they can shout at me, like it’s my fault that four yuppie fucks from the city, but really from an hour out, want more more more – and wait there, at the line, as Tommy spreads butter, almost smacks it, onto the blacktop, not looking at me while throwing the bread, really smacking it now, onto the butter, which gives off a hiss like a snake, like the tattoo on Tommy’s left arm that holds his spatula and pulls at my hair, but only after work, that drowns out his first expletive but not his second, directed at me and table 404 and his boss and his mom and Jesus, before looking up from his hands, which I am also watching, with interest, to see my eyes, which I have purposefully widened to look totally innocent, like a girlchild, so that he’s nice to me, before his gaze darts down to my chest, which I have pushed out so my arms, which are framing the curve of both breasts, are pulled tight against my sides, cursing again when he realizes he burnt the bread, but only a little, not enough that I cannot still serve it, because of my chest and my eyes, but mostly my chest – which I know I will pay for later, in the backseat of his car, Weezer blaring from the stereo, because he is not a nice boy or one with good taste, with his left hand, the one with the snake, in my hair, and maybe I’ll cry, in the good way, the one I did not know existed before, that I had to bum thirty-two cigarettes off of Tommy to learn about, even though I don’t smoke, but for right now I just press my thighs together, pretending to be impatient – before I blow him a kiss on my way back upstairs with the bread, that I really could have charged for or maybe had someone else get for me – it really, I guess, would have been smarter – in my hands that are shaking from excitement, despite myself, for what will happen later because I ran my own bread, but mainly from nicotine hunger – the kind that I’ve felt all night, even when I was talking to 404, especially then – because I was supposed to have five minutes, before they asked for the bread, which they stole, to run out the back door, the one that leads to the dumpster, hit the vape I borrowed from Kendra, who wouldn’t have asked for it back for another twenty minutes, close my eyes, sink against the brick of the building, ignore how my sweat, seeping out from under my arms, smells, underneath my supposedly sexy vanilla perfume, a little bit like leftover bits of Tommy’s skin, still rubbed off on mine from last night in his car – Weezer, left hand, snake, hair – and focus instead on myself, how proud I am that I did not, for once, trudge downstairs and waltz into the kitchen, act like I owned the place because the kitchen boys love me, too much, not the right way, with hands in my hair, lean against the expo line, widen my eyes so that he’d be nice, push out my chest, and ask Tommy for a cigarette – because I am supposed to have quit both for my health.

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Shades of Jade | Marlana Botnick Fireman

It was happening again. My son Max was at the top of the oak tree, his feet wrapped around a branch, fingers stretching toward the blue-gray sky to snatch a leaf.

“Please come down.” He was so young, small, even for a five year-old.

He shook his head. When he hopped from branch to branch, sometimes stuffing a large green leaf into his mouth, he never faltered, never fell. Max’s skin was glowing jade in the night; Max glowed from the inside out. I begged from the sunken shadows of the oak. “I’ll take you to the trampoline park?” Max tilted his head and jumped from the towering limb, landing like a cat at my feet.

Across the street there was a bar full of drinkers. I watched them from my porch. I didn’t know being a parent would be so lonely. They were always engaged in electric conversation, sometimes cracking the silence of the night open with their raucous laughter; other times conversing quietly in groups and sucking on cigarettes.

When school let out, I promised myself I wouldn’t bribe Max. I would be gentle and less protective of him, the sole survivor of twins I’d grown in my own womb. Made by science, twins for someone who wanted children and had no urge to marry.

My uterus glowed emerald through my soft, post-birth skin for days after I labored, and no one understood why.

* * *

After Max went back to bed, I watched the drinkers at the bar across the street and cried. Not padlocks nor rock climbs could keep Max, whose skin glowed shades of fern, from ascending to the tippy-tops of trees. In the past I would watch for a while before calling him. When Max thought he was alone, he moved with determined grace, a dance performed only among branches. I was too scared to say aloud that perhaps my child wasn’t human. At night, at least.

* * *

“Max,” I whispered. His long lashes fluttered. His jammies were buttoned up to his chin. “Should you be out there?” I gestured to the tree outside his window. He nodded. “You need it?”

“Yeah, I need it.” He closed his eyes like he was conversing with his intuition. “At night and in summer.” I looked at his Elmo wall calendar. Summer would begin her slow, humid haunt in a few days.

Max knew. He’d known the whole time that he was meant to be in the trees. “It feels like being thirsty.”

I kissed him, made him swear he knew how much I loved him. Max climbed, moved from one tree to the next until he diffused into night. He promised he would be back in time for kindergarten in the fall.

I closed the door to my empty house and went to join a group of drinkers. They were rapt with my story until I told them it was true. I shushed them and then called out:

“I love you, Max.” The drinkers got quiet.

And from a distance we heard his voice: “I love you back!”

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Rainbow Mittens | Lea Pounds

One chilly fall morning long ago, Mama woke me before sunrise. She told me I was going to visit Gran. She and Papa would come as soon as he got back from the war. She packed clothes into my old school backpack while I dressed. When she wasn’t looking, I snuck in my favorite doll and two of my early reader books. I put on my coat and hat, but I’d lost my mittens. Mama sighed and said we didn’t have time to look. She promised that she’d knit me another pair.  She held my hand as we walked to the road where the man who smuggled things waited in his truck. I climbed in beside him. She shut the door.

I wanted her to get in too. But the look on her face said don’t make a fuss.  We drove north up the mountain into the woods. I turned to watch between the trees. A truck pulled into our yard. A soldier from the other side got out. Mama stood, hands raised high. 

Best not to look back, the man said. I hugged my backpack and pretended she’d been waving to me.

He handed me a cookie wrapped in a paper napkin. My wife makes them, he said. I thanked him and put it in my pocket. We hadn’t driven very far when he pulled to the side of the road. He said now it gets tricky because you have to hide and not make a sound. He opened a panel beneath the seat. I slid into the opening. The space smelled like the restroom at school after the soldiers came for the janitor. When they came for the teachers, we didn’t have school anymore.  

Don’t make a sound, the man said and closed the panel. We drove a while and stopped. I heard the man talking in the language of the soldiers on the other side. We started again. My stomach rumbled so I nibbled the cookie. We drove a little farther and stopped again. The man got out. I heard him open the back of the truck. Men laughed, the coarse sound they make when they’re talking about things children aren’t supposed to know. I smelled cigarette smoke and he said something in the strange language.    

We drove on. After a while he stopped again and opened the panel. I crawled out. Good job, not a peep out of you he said. I thanked him and brushed the dirt from my coat. We drove for a long time after that on rutted roads deep in the forest. I slept leaning against the door. When I woke, we were winding our way into a valley toward a car at the side of the road. There’s your granny, he said. Gran, wearing a bright yellow scarf, waited by the car. 

I hadn’t seen her since the war started. When I climbed out of the truck, she hugged me tight. She was a trooper, the man said. Gran handed him an envelope, then drove us to her  creaky old house at the edge of the village.

She helped me get undressed and into a tub of warm water. I scrubbed away the smell of the truck and the sound of strange men talking. For supper we had chicken stew with dumplings. Afterwards we sat on the porch and watched the stars. When her old hound dog climbed on the seat and put his head on my lap, I scratched his ears. 

I helped Gran tend the garden and care for the chickens. Sometimes before dawn we’d walk to the river and catch fish. I went to school again where there were other children who’d come over the mountain to visit relatives or family friends. 

The war crept north but here there was enough. Enough to eat. Enough to stay warm. Enough to sleep soundly at night. Time passed, one season to the next.

In the spring the man who smuggles things came to Gran’s house. She frowned when she opened the door. Because she was not pleased to see him, neither was I until he pulled a package from his pocket. This is for you from your mother, he said. Wrapped in pages torn from a math school book were a pair of mittens knitted with different colors of yarn. 

That was all her effects he said to Gran. She swallowed hard and blinked her eyes fast before she said, well those are pretty like a rainbow aren’t they. I thanked the man. That night I wore the mittens to bed and imagined Mama knitting after supper like she used to before Papa went away. I imagined her wanting to bring the package to me herself, but she couldn’t travel because of the worsening war. I imagined her handing the package to the man and saying, for my girl. 

Eventually the fighting ended. Papa came to Gran’s but the war had stolen his mind. One day he went for a walk and never came back. After that, when Gran hugged me tight at bedtime she would say in a strange quiet voice, it’s you and me sweetie. 

The war has long been over and Gran lies in the graveyard beside the church. Now I help my own girl into her coat. Boots scrape on the porch and her father says, come and see the daffodils blooming. At the bottom of the basket where we keep the winter things, she sees the rainbow mittens. The frayed and unraveled places are mended with white thread. Look how pretty mama, she says as she slips the too big mittens on her hands. Yes, they’re pretty like a rainbow I say. 

My mother’s ghost walks with us as we step out into the bright morning light.  

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Razia, Razia | Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

I select a yellow songbird from the cages the bird vendor dangles towards me and pay him 300 rupees. He thanks me, then asks, Why do you purchase a bird every day, Amma? 

Curious as most are about a widow living by herself in the mohallah, the man tries to peek inside my house through the door slit.

That’s none of your business. My bird, my money, I’ll do whatever I want. I shut the door on his face.

Ammi, Ammi, Razia calls from the bedroom in her precariously thin voice, audible only to my attuned ears.

Yes, my beta, I rush to my daughter, making kissing sounds as if she were a child of four and not a young woman of 29. I prop her onto the pillows arranged along the headboard, my arms aching with her weightlessness. Her eyes are hollow, her head bare as an upturned handi, her body shivering under the layers of blankets.

So pretty. Razia’s pale face lights up on seeing the songbird as if someone has turned on a lantern inside her. 

It’s just like the bird you had when you were ten, I place the cage on the stool beside her. Remember how you stole green chilis and fruit to overfeed it?     

Chee Chee Chee, the bird sings for Razia, tilts its neck to look at her through the slats.

My daughter rounds her lips to whistle for the bird but her lungs fail her. How she used to elicit Bollywood tunes before. Before. Before I got her married to Shahid—an engineer working in the USA. Before she failed to conceive for five years. Before she was diagnosed with a late stage of uterine cancer. Before my application for a US visitor visa was rejected, twice. Before I watched her withering into a husk on video calls. Before I pleaded with Shahid to bring her to me.

I fetch some green chilis and Razia feeds the songbird with fingers just as thin and tender. She names the bird Sarson for her color. Yesterday, I bought a koel and she named it Kaali. Before that, it was a mynah she named Bhoori.

Razia’s excitement wears her down, her smiles are pained. How I wish I’d let Razia marry the man of her choice, the math teacher at her college. At least then she would have remained in front of my eyes. My daughter never complained about her marriage, but Shahid’s face when he brought her back said it all—it was the relief of a courier man having successfully delivered the last package of the day. 

My daughter refuses further treatment, says she’s tired of chemo. Her appetite is as small as a sparrow’s. Her meals are bone soup and grapefruit, a bucket waiting beside the bed for her to throw up.

By mid-afternoon, Razia leans back, exhausted, while the bird is still active and singing. I ask her to open the cage and free her feathery friend. The songbird hops out, opens and closes its beak, looks at Razia, then takes flight. I kiss my daughter and hold her close.

The imam at the mosque says prayers continue to work after medicine fails. I entreat Allah—pray seven times a day instead of five, recite verses of Quran on the tasbih, fast from dawn to dusk every Friday. The next-door neighbor says that the prayers of innocent creatures are more effective than those of humans. So I have Razia free a bird every day, hoping it will whisper a word to the skies, hoping angels will take the prayer to Allah.

The next day, the bird vendor brings me a handsome parrot with lush green feathers, a long tail, and a rose ring around its neck.

1000 rupees. He grins with his bad teeth and runs a hand through his black beard.

The bird says, Assalamalaikum, Sister, to greet me respectfully. I hand the bird dealer the money I’ve gleaned by selling my wedding gold.

Look, Razia, a talking parrot, I call from the doorway, excited to show her the lovely bird. I know you’ll name it Hariyala.

No response from inside. Razia never sleeps during the day. She has trouble falling asleep despite the weariness. I latch the door and step in.

Razia? Razia?

Utter silence. My feet freeze, refuse to carry me across the courtyard into the bedroom.

The smart parrot mimics me.

Razia, Razia.

Not a peep. Only the bird seller advertising his wares through the alleys. Parrots, mynahs, sparrows, koels . . . the very best ones.

I shudder and tighten my grip around the parrot as it flaps its wings and claws at my arm to free itself. My palms are sweaty but full of unusual strength and purpose. I twist the bird’s neck to the right with a quick motion. Snap. It falls on the brick floor. A lone green feather breaks away from the lifeless bundle and rises towards the sky.

About the author:

Moon | Mrityunjay Mohan

I

Black. Skin flakes like rust from steel. I am housed in a bubble of fear. I am held in a cage up in the clouds. The oar is sunlight in the skies. A weeping tree bends, touches the earth to its forehead. It prays, twists, and I watch the branches unfurl like hair from a bun. The sea shudders like children in snow like it is in fear of my trip. The weeping tree looks over at me, keeps vigil, holds itself responsible for my safety. In small mud houses live small mud people. In rocking wooden boats sit mottled boys with leaking flesh and organs undone. I feel I am a wound. I drip and drip and drip.

II

Grey. In the moon, mother said, live two angels. They breathe helium (what is that?), they sit on craters (what is that?). The oar laps in the moonlight, a crescent-shaped scar on my left cheek. I am sitting between wood and the moon. I am closer to the stars than the sand. In little pieces of seashells, pressed to the ear, you can still hear my voice. On the shore of the sea, across brown sand, you can still see my face. I know the way like I know the strands of my hair. Black as the sea under my rocking, rocking, rocking boat. I want to reach the moon. That is why I row.

III

Green. Moss and vines climb upon the little wooden doors of little wooden houses. In the sea, algae and seaweed float like abandoned children in the playground. On the moon, a smiling face looks down at me. She is shrouded in white. The light from the stars glitter like dust in sunlight. Oars of moonlight filter into the sea, splash like sinking bodies, and thrashing arms. The moon is a watercolor on the black sea under the boat. Mama isn’t on Earth anymore. Mama is not alive on land anymore. Mama is in the moon. I see her in the craters (what is that?), breathing helium (what is that?). I quicken my pace. I will reach her soon. 

IV

Brown. The wood tumbles like a clumsy man left ashore. It tips to the left, then right, spilling water like tea from a cup. Milk foaming at the top. The clouds cluster over the sea like cells over a wound. Form a group like they are little gossiping children. I know they are talking about me, saying things about the little boy on the little boat. Whispering their nightly prayers before disappearing into their rooms. The night is darkening around me like a blanket, cozy as a blister on the lower lip. Little children dot the moon like hollowed-out eyes, tiny sockets gleaming, a star on each round brown sea. Thin, shapeless skies. I am closer now. I can make out the little curve of the mole on my mother’s nose. I can smell her in the sea. She smells of sandalwood. She smells of wet forests after dark. She is the sweat that hangs around my forehead. She is the hope coiled around my chest like armor. I know I will get there in a few minutes. Closer still. 

V

White. I am swaddled in a blanket. I wrap the cloth around my shoulders and step out of the trembling boat. The boat is human; it aches, struggles, folds in on itself. I leave the boat at the steps to the moon. My fingers are curled into a fist, forming little crescent moons on my palm. The steps are rickety, old, warped, wooden planks. They are little talking angels covered in brown. I can hear them whispering about my arrival. I walk up the steps, and into a large crater (what is that?) and mama is here. She looks at me. She wears a white gown. I breathe helium (what is that?) and mama beckons me forward. I grab her hand between my own like a single oar in an abandoned boat, like I am to be saved from sinking in the sea, from sinking amidst the little talking angels. I am standing in a house of white dust. I am enclosed in thin-veiled fear. I sink into mama’s body like the moon sinking into the clouds. I am a translucent bag of wounded organs. I cannot talk anymore. Syllables wither and melt within me. They turn to solid husks of forgotten letters. Mama kisses my forehead. And rocks me to sleep. 

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Rock, Shore, Thunder | Maria S. Picone

The nails chime as she hammers the boards of Rock Point Lighthouse. The record temperatures curve up and up, clingy fog along her back. The weather a tool wielded by a vengeful God—the year’s twenty-first named hurricane entering the Maine coast stage left. 

She ambles across her domain. In her eyes turns a kaleidoscope of patterns, brick, layered paint, iterated windows, metal. Her own turtle shell. 

The drizzle elongates. She pats the wall and goes in.

*

Slim, wiry, and freckled with brown curls, she does not fit the lighthouse keeper norm: wall-eyed, weather-battered men with few social skills. Still, her mouth has the same frown lines, carved in rough and dangerous conditions. She strips off her work gear. Darts in, out the shower, rubbing water and dead skin off her body with her towel. The frizzies in her hair tell the humidity.

Though most visitors never see the lighthouse as tourism has migrated so far from the seas, she imagines they would be surprised by the care someone has gone through to decorate it. An arrow sign that points to the “Beach” has been modified so that the arrow curves back into itself. 

It’s a mistake to check her phone; notifications flash three languages from concerned relatives and friends. Heard there was a big storm. You okay? Mother’s tongue and father’s tongue melding together with the interloping English they immigrated into. 

Her parents: They’re calling this a Cat 6 superhurricane. Slow moving. 

She starts typing but her thumbs have nothing to say. Her hair leaves droplets on the screen. Storm not yet come in.

*

With the progress of time, hurricane season swells into months upon months, waves devour the cliffs like Oreo cookies, lobsters migrate ever northward. It’s rumored that the last lighthouse keeper packed up one day and moved to the Rockies, a clear mistake given the plummet in air quality out west. 

*

Even though she knows the list like her native tongue, she counts by hand and touch. Her supplies sit like stuffed animals in easy to reach places—the couch, the countertops, even the bed. Filtered water and boring food.

Her duty is the captaining of a stationary ship: her joke to friends who couldn’t understand why she’d left the promise of it all: daily Starbucks dosing, corporate communications job, loving husband. After the divorce, there had been a cooling off, as they assessed what they knew. She grasps the silver packages that give life; she runs numbers in her head. Waiting, counting. 

Some friends who believed his mournful eyes kept the husband, and she kept the lighthouse. She would rather a vengeful God than a vengeful human who thinks he’s God.

*

They call them fish, the lighthouse keepers who survive when their charge does not. Sometimes they watch the destruction from afar via satellite imagery and hope; sometimes they wash up on shore like castoffs from a sunken ship; and other times still, they witness their curation deteriorate, called in front of a board to be informed of full divestment.

*

Like an old friend, the hurricane falls in and stays. The lighthouse cracks, rocks, rolls like a ship. Vertigo surrounds her. Thunder comes to sit in her heart, usurping its beats. Messages pour. Underneath, the implication. 

Why not come back to your old life. Why not start again from before you met him. Your father and I miss you.

Why not emerge.

The phone, on silent, is its own lightning. There’s a science behind this, like the ebb and flow of her matrimony. She waits on the edge of the bed, sweating palms braced against damp blankets.

*

In college, they’d studied the Ship of Theseus, a persistent identity quandary. A lighthouse was nothing more than a static example, linking historical past to nostalgic present. In reality, caulking, caulking, and more caulking. Discerning which available materials lay closest to authenticity, procuring them from her modest discretionary. Hosting various fundraising activities, from “Dinner Date with a Lighthouse Keeper” on socials to glitzy black-tie and lobster fetes with glitterati. Grant applications down to formatting and itemized budgets. It takes a crew to support a lighthouse. She dives in but stands alone, a beacon near, but never on, the shore. 

When inside a tempest, best to keep others at a distance. 

*

The morning hits like a fresh band of storm, a countershock of silence and light. A tentative sun has risen. She wakes mashing the phone screen, finding service enough to see that this was the eye, not the end. Walking, caulking what she can. Surveying slices of flesh the wind already sheared, putting visuals to sounds that orchestrated her sleep. The final message from her parents reads, This is serious. She types them a note, hopes it escapes the stifling sunlight.

* 

It is alive, howling, every blow, every abusive word, each power play blasted in full lunatic moon, abraded with wind, derided by rain and it keeps her up, up where she cannot will it down and she holds the phone like a beacon and the generator goes and it is hot with fear and the smell of brackish water and the lighthouse loses its oneness its shelter its shell safety and comes down the way a tree crushes a car and dents, splits her resting place, holding integrity, batters her like a drunken night and her skin song dances bruises, sweats a second rain, water a gulp in the dark and the storm, the lighthouse over, a marriage can be in pieces a lighthouse too and it is time when the sun comes up Maine pink into boiled red on the final fermata of the storm and backpack in hand she jumps ship—

*

Thrash, swim. 

Waves calming, to shore, some resilient Mainer checking the coast to find her, the glow she’s moving toward those damn notifications, chimes of lives pinging her, to come home.

Inland, inland.

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Birds of Prey | Tiffany Promise

My dime-store bouquet—stargazer heavy—and his mam’s old ring perch uselessly in my lap. Re-upped from my sister’s 2001 prom, my dress is snagged with disappointment and Zima. It fits just fine. 

We were supposed to get hitched today. But on the way to the church, Dusty squeaked clean: It was only meant to be a one-night thing. Not a lifetime. But he has morals.

We’re parked in the church parking lot, but I refuse to get out of the truck. I’d worked for an hour to get my makeup just so, and now my face is a swamp. Inky tears, loosened lashes. My fresh fuchsia mouth—a wound. 

I want to scream. To tell him that it’s all his fault. That our baby will have the beady black eyes of a beast. Veiny wings, wiry fur, a forked tongue. I know this like I know my own name. Our first time together—right here in this shit pickup—he’d almost called me “Betty,” but recovered with a quick “Birdie.” Close enough.

Perched on the tailgate, Dusty guzzles. One Coors after another. He tosses the empties into the truck-bed, forming a little golden mound. I think about climbing into that mound, settling down amongst the rest of his trash.

When Dusty finally comes around to my window, slurring, I roll it down. Just a few inches. “Birdie girl, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t not love you. It’s just…” He trails off and cracks open another beer, spits a brown gob on the concrete. I know exactly how his mouth tastes right now, just like it did that first time: foamy with spittle, bits of sweet tobacco clinging to his lips.

“My name is Nightingale,” I whisper into the tacky bodice of my dress. He’s already out of earshot.

We met at a Halloween Party six months ago. I was dressed as a fairy—wings made of pantyhose and coat hangers, a bunch of glitter. He was John Wayne. Or maybe he wasn’t, but I like to remember him that way: handsome and stout, a rugged scuff to his boots.

On my way to find the keg, I was sideswiped by Krispy Kritter who was headbanging alone in front of his boombox. My wings smashed the floor, my dress split up the side. See-through with shame, I froze. Until John Wayne reached down and took my hand. He walked me to the washroom and shut the door behind me.

“Just come inside so we can get this over with,” Dusty begs through the stuck-shut truck window. His voice is barbed. I always knew he didn’t love me, but I thought he would’ve been able to keep it hush. “Everybody’s waiting.”

I spit at the glass. Warble his reflection.

Surprised, he steps back and punches the tailgate. His knuckles split wide. Our baby’s mouth will be blood-colored, too. Shriveled and sulfur-stinking with fangs sharp enough to pierce a throat. 

Nursing his hand, Dusty mucks up the front of his rented tux. I think about going to him, wrapping his paw in a torn-off segment of my dress and cradling it to my chest. But I will never—not ever—again.

He’s singing an old Hank Williams song, losing the lyrics into the top of his beer can. His face looks green. He wobbles. Our baby will be a water balloon. It will smash the second it falls out from between my legs. No one will be there to see the burst—mostly clear, just a tinge of pink—so I’ll soak it up with old kitchen rags and bury them in a shoebox out back.

I hear a muffled thud and look back. 

Dusty is collapsed on the tailgate, his eyes closed against the sun. His pearl-snaps glitter and bands of wavy light stream from his body making him look like a saint. Our baby will be a god: cornsilken curls, plump red lips. I’ll pat down his feathers with baby oil every morn, fatten him up with my own creamy milk. 

Dusty is collapsed on the tailgate, his eyes closed against the sun. His pearl-snaps glitter, his neck is bent at an odd angle, his boots hang off the tail. He looks like a sock without a foot. 

Please, God, help me. I don’t know what to do anymore, I pray, twisting my hair around my finger. My eyes climb heavenward, right up the church’s spindly steeple.

I see a vulture circling. His heavy body thrums the air. It’s not the sweet, smooth glide of a nightingale, but a clumsy swoop, meant only for destruction. With his hooked beak, he’ll pick at a carcass until it’s empty. Til’ there’s nothing left but dirty white bone. 

Our baby will be dead before it’s even born. Probably dead already. A gaping, weeping hole shot straight through the center of my universe.

Birds of Prey by Tiffany Promise was selected as the winner of the 2023 HoneyBee Prize in Fiction by Roxane Gay. Here’s what Ms. Gay had to say about the piece:

Birds of Prey is a confluence of contradictions. There are events in a person’s life that are often joyful but as this economic story unravels, it is clear that there is no happy ending to be found here. Written with a bold and unique voice, this language-driven story about predator and prey is a masterful example of what flash fiction can be.

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Good Friday | Richard Stimac

His mother knew each storm told its own story. Above the farmer’s empty fields, the hard red spring wheat not yet sown, pillars of lightning cleaved the sky in two and pustulant-green columnar clouds flattened like anvils for God to forge his anger. The thunder of each hammer stroke echoed across the heavens as if an immortal blacksmith pounded out his own nails for a yet unnamed, yet predestined, divine blood appeasement of a prophet yet unchosen by this fickle jealous god.

“It rains every Good Friday,” his mother said. “Because of Jesus.”

She sat on the love seat of fake black leather fastened by rivets to staves. She slipped each bead of her rosary through the needle of her index finger and thumb. Her lips moved but no words ushered forth, as if she adored a dumb god of a bygone pagan race, a people that worshipped hewn stone and chiseled wood.

On the wall hung a crucifix that slipped open to reveal a vial of holy water and two wax candles. Bent like supplicants, palm fronds haloed the head of Jesus. In hours, these leaves would be burnt as offerings and their ash smudged upon the foreheads of the devout. But now, now, they were brown and dry and crumbled to the touch.

“Church in ten minutes,” she said.

It was not Mass, not on Good Friday. His mother knew better, and knowing better is the cornerstone of faith.

“Go,” she said, “wash your hands.”

He did as his mother commanded.

His father lay on the couch and watched football.

“Off to church?” the man said.

The boy nodded.

“Come here,” his father said. “Help me up.”

His father moved like drunk men move. First, he reached upward, to nothing, until his son took hold of the man’s wrists and helped him pivot upright to sitting.

“Help me swing my legs around,” his father said.

The son took one leg and then the other and helped his father place his feet flat on the floor.

“Get me a beer.”

“Tell your father he doesn’t need another beer,” the woman with the rosary said.

“Tell your mother that I’ll drink beer when I want to drink beer.”

“I pray to God for patience,” the woman said as she crossed herself, kissed the crucifix of the rosary, and wound it into a small plastic case that she placed on the end table.

“Pray to God to get me a beer.”

The boy stood between his parents. His father was a heavy, mounding rain cloud of the plains. His mother, the cold dark soil of the Midwest.

The mother nodded to her son, then disappeared down the unlit hall as if she were the high priest entered the adytum.

“What’s she praying to God for?” his father said. “Go on. Get me that beer.”

The boy went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door.

“Take one from a pack already open. I don’t like to have so many things open and not used up?”

The son brought his father a beer.

“Sit down,” the man said. The boy sat next to him.

Outside, a strong wind hummed. In a matter of seconds, the sun was blotted out and darkness descended upon the land. A bruise-blue glow from lightning dashed between the curtain gaps and danced like drunken Angels of the Lord against the wall.

“Let me tell you something,” his father said. “You hear me? Are you listening to me?”

By this time, the boy’s mother returned from the bathroom. She stood in the hallway door and watched her husband speak to her son.

“She don’t know,” the man said. “She, her Jesus. But she don’t know. If her Jesus can do so much, how come I can’t walk? Jesus maked other men walk. But he don’t make me walk.”

The drunk man downed the beer.

“Go get me another one.”

“Put your shoes on,” his mother said.

“I said, get me another beer.”

“He is not getting you another beer.”

“If I tell him to, then he is.”

“You are already drunk. At 11 a.m. On Good Friday.”

“When you’re drunk, every Friday is good.”

The boy looked at the floor. The shadows from the rain against the window mottled on the carpet as if a flood had come to the house.

“Beer,” the man said. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and pushed him off the couch. Instead of standing on his own two feet, the boy fell to the floor. In his mind, he sunk into a dark abyss.

“Don’t hit him.”

“I didn’t hit him. He’s just dramatic.”

The woman knelt next to the boy drowning in his own imagination.

“Get up, Goddamnit.”

“Don’t curse.”

“Woman, what do you want me to do?”

“Just do nothing.”

At that moment, one thunderclap literally shook the house. The lights flickered. Both the man and the woman paused and looked upward. The boy broke through the waves in his mind, stood upright, and ran from the living room, through the kitchen, and out the backdoor.

Outside, the rain fell hard, like small pellets. The boy sat in a dirt patch in the middle of the chain-link fenced yard. He took handfuls of dust and poured it over his head. Soon, mixed with the rain, black streaks streamed down his face.

His mother ran after him to lead him back into the house. His father wailed an apology barely audible through the storm.

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Mothers and Brothers | Gargi Mehra

Things That Happened on Your Birthday 

Mother gasped awake in the middle of the night. Father’s slumbering hand cupped the small of her back, as his stagger trailed her waddle to the bathroom. Her palm cradled the curve of her swollen belly. Your sister kicked a pillow off her bed. 

Andre-Jacques Garnerin hooked a parachute to a hydrogen balloon and climbed three thousand feet above the earth. He pendulated wildly on his descent, but touched down intact less than a mile from where he lifted off.

In first period, your sister pried out a shard of lead lodged in the sharpener, and sliced her finger on the blade. No moans of agony escaped her lips. The school nurse dabbed mercurochrome, and hurried her back to the class.

A series of violent earthquakes rocked the island of Formosa. Dams broke, landslides severed traffic, and all forms of communication snapped. More than a hundred people died. 

The doctor delivered you from Mother’s womb. Father wrapped your inert form in his arms, then buried you beside his tears. Your sister swallowed the words that lived on her tongue, as she nursed Mother back to health.

Apollo 7 scuttled back to the home planet after a journey just short of eleven days. It splashed into the choppiest ocean, safely, triggering hope for the next spaceflight. 

I came into this world. Father bemoaned my flat nose, and Mother’s pillow soaked up the tear she shed, upon noting the lack of appendage between my legs.

A few hundred miles away, a galaxy of scientists fired a space probe to the moon.

Father ordered cake, Mother adorned it, your sister wrecked the name on it. The four of us lit a candle, and I blew it out, my wishes spraying on the mounds of icing.

---

Mother and I 

You light a puff like you’ve done it before, but it’s the first time I witness it, months after turning fourteen. I ask why, but really, I should know. The radio jockey tumbles three times while spewing my dedication for your anniversary – the wrong ditty, a mangling of my name, and completely wrecking my gender. The last one flips my heart over.

Your husband poked the bridge of his eyeglass right to the back of the nose when I prodded him to call the radio station. He draped files over his arms and coffined himself in the study. When the door swung closed on his towers of binders, I dawdled back to the living room and dialed the number. 

In the bathroom, I grab the razor and shave my jaws once more, hoping to coax fertile crop from barren land. 

Back in your room, you’ve moved on to the fourth one, scattering ash in the tray.

In one of my dreams, I lift the cylinder of death from your lips, blow out the embers, and park the stub upon one of the many ridges that line the glass salver. Your lips curl, you gaze at the whorls that could have been, but you never fill your lungs with toxins again.

In another, I grab one from the packet and set it to my lips. Your eyes follow my fingers as I lead the flame close to the tip, but you don’t sigh when I light it correctly. You don’t smack the butt away as I imagine you will, and we stew in silence, while Father wades through an ocean of legal memos.

In none of my dreams do I throw a haversack stuffed with cash and clothes upon my back, stuff my feet into threadbare sneakers, and slink out of the house.

---

Blood Brother

They sliced open a frosting-topped cake the day you shivered out from our mother’s belly – the first sonny to hoist the family name upon his shoulders. Our sister shrugged off her blanket of quietude and queened over you when the elders averted their gaze.

Father longed to break scientific ground in distant lands. Mother lingered by the corded telephone, but the call never came. The flames of fate doused their hopes.

They shook their heads when you rolled off the path of learning, and chose instead to trade fragrant erasers and spiral-bound books at the local stationery store. Across town, our sister’s research papers drew accolades. 

You unearthed love in the bottles of amber. It warmed your throat even when you alone manned the sunless shop. No one witnessed you stagger out of your chair. The pencils and sharpeners lay mute when your cranial base cracked against the corner of the shelf.

Neighbours buzzed around the ambulance. Someone threw a shroud over your body, while our family watched, their eyes bereft of understanding. 

But no – you had slipped out lifeless from the womb. Father mixed his tears into the earth where he buried you.

When the earth had spun once around the sun, our mother ejected me into the world. Our relatives mourned the missing muscle between my legs. 

The call came for Father, and we flew across the oceans to a continent so cold and distant that Mother’s tongue froze. Father and sister toiled in labs. Together, they brought home trophies that flooded our house with silver. I learned to swirl in a centrifuge while holding in my guts. When I hurtled through the air to the miles of emptiness beyond the earth, I glimpsed the remnants of the beautiful life we had weaved together.

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